Nordic inquiry in Quality Literature Education: Danish, Swedish and Norwegian teachers’ enactments, adaptations and understandings across national contexts
Submitted by:
Nikolaj Elf
Abstract:
The Quality Literature Education project (QUALE) is a qualitative small-scale multiple case study investigating what local transformations of a learning resource designed for inquiry-oriented literature education in classrooms in Norway, Sweden and Denmark tell us about inquiry-oriented teaching in practice.
Theoretically, the study builds on a prior large-scale intervention focusing on inquiry-oriented literature education in a Danish context taking phenomenology as a point of departure (abbreviated the ‘KiDM project’, see Hansen et al. 2019).
The research design of QUALE includes interventions in three Scandinavian schools guided by digital teaching material based on the KiDM material. After adapting the material for teaching, the participating eight teachers and eight researchers met at a two-day seminar and discussed the experience, understanding, and practicing of inquiry-based literature education. As such, the seminar established a communicative space (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005) for investigating the shared perspective of practitioners and researchers.
In this presentation, we aim to answer the following research question: How do participating teachers in Sweden, Norway and Denmark enact, adapt and understand inquiry-based literature teaching, and more specifically the program theory’s eight ‘didactic principles’ (commitment, dialogic community, inquiry-oriented courses, guided openness, disciplinary framing, varied progression, multimodal production, mastery of interpretation), and seven ‘strategies’ (pre-understanding, experience, discovery, examination, elaboration, interpretation, contextualization)?
Data consists of 190 minutes of dialogue, which has been transcribed and coded using NVivo. The coding has focused both on the eight didactic principles and the seven strategies and on potential contextual aspects co-shaping the enactment, adaptation and understanding.
Findings indicate a validation of the findings of the large-scale intervention project that took place in Denmark, while also offering new contextually shaped understandings. The ‘experience strategy’ emphasizing bodily experience and first-order knowledge is found to be central amongst teachers and is in opposition to the dominating everyday practice of literature teaching. We also find that the establishment of a dialogic community in the classroom is pivotal and at the same time challenging for the teachers. Furthermore, variation is found in the way national and local examination practices co-shape classroom practice.
QUALE is embedded in the Nordforsk Research Center Quality in Nordic Teaching (QUINT) and contributes to a broader discussion of quality in teaching (Elf, 2021). For discussion, we argue that inquiry-based literature education supplements existing knowledge about the quality of teaching reading, emphasizing particularities in strategies for reading and interpreting aesthetic texts.
Keywords: Literature education; inquiry-oriented teaching; comparative studies; teacher-researcher collaboration.
References:
Elf, N. (2021). The surplus of quality: How to study quality in teaching in three QUINT projects. In M. Blikstad-Balas, K. Klette, & M. Tengberg (Eds.), Ways of Analysing Teaching Quality: Potentials and Pitfalls (pp. 53-88). Scandinavian University Press. https://doi.org/https://doi/pdf/10.18261/9788215045054-2021-02
Hansen, T. I., Elf, N., Gissel, S. T., & Steffensen, T. (2019). Designing and testing a new concept for inquiry-based literature teaching: Design Principles, development and adaptation of a large-scale intervention study in Denmark. Contribution to a special issue Systematically Designed Literature Classroom Interventions: Design Principles, Development and Implementation, edited by Marloes Schrijvers, Karen Murphy, and Gert Rijlaarsdam. L1 - Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 19. https://doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2019.19.04.03
Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (2005). Participatory action research: Communicative action and the public sphere. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 559–604). Sage.